The genocide in Rwanda could have been
prevented. There were many steps that the international community could have
taken to prevent the genocide that would not have involved military action.

Solidarity within the UN was practically
nonexistent with regards to Rwanda. Most countries had no investments or
anything to gain from helping Rwanda, so little was done. Three of the five
permanent members of the UN had reasons not to prevent the genocide. The US had
nothing to gain, and France and China were supplying the government with arms.
If the UN had expressed more concern for the atrocities going on, had decided
early on that what was happening was indeed a genocide, action could have been
taken much sooner. Early action could have prevented France and China from
funding and/or fueling the genocide, and also could have prevented French troops
from helping the Hutu Power regime flee the country.

The United States was very loath to take any
kind of action in Rwanda because Rwanda did not represent one of the country’s
economic interests. They refused even simple means of interference, and even
helped to impede other countries from taking action. One thing that could have
been done by any country was simply to recognize that the conditions in Rwanda
after their independence leant themselves to the possibility of genocide.
Recognizing this early and taking steps to ensure that genocidal plots were not
put into action by the government could have been a serious obstacle to the
genocide’s execution. Instead, United States officials argued over the use of
the word genocide for fear that it would compel the country to act, as it
obviously would have. If the conditions had been recognized, or rather,
acknowledged sooner, the international community could have responded much
quicker.

Rwanda did not have all the technology
available to more developed countries. Telephone lines were, and are, scarce,
but the country was heavily saturated with radios. In a country where almost
everyone had a portable radio, especially after the government issued them to
Hutus for free, radio was the most suitable and effective way of spreading
propaganda. Only the United States had the technology for jamming the radio
waves of propaganda, and, when alerted to this fact, the country staunchly
refused to use the technology, to lend it, or even lend the equipment, to the
United Nations so that someone else could take action. This completely
prevented the international community from being able to jam the radio
frequencies. Had they been able to, however, they would have been able to stop
the spread of hate messages, and later in the genocide, it would have nearly
incapacitated the government from hunting down targeted individuals, as lists of
these people were read of the Hutu Power radio station. This could arguably
have stopped the genocide in its tracks without setting a single soldier on
Rwandan soil.

The United States and other western countries
generally interact with other states, specifically on a state level. The
consequences of this are that, even when the UN has reports that a genocide may
be taking place within a country, its response is to notify the government that
is possibly carrying out a genocide that there may be a genocide happening in
their country. Obviously, if reports are leaking to the international
community, it must be well-known intranationally, and the government, for some
reason, is not taking action. The insistence on only dealing with other
countries as states prevents any action being done for the voiceless
individuals.

Again, on the issue of support, had the United
States not so staunchly opposed action in Rwanda, other countries would probably
have been more willing to lend troops or equipment or money. As it was, the
United States’ refusal to contribute set the tone for the intervention, and that
tone basically told other countries that they were not expected to help.
Furthermore, when the United States did begrudgingly contribute equipment, they
delayed its employ by haggling over the fee to the UN, to whom it has never paid
its dues. This delay cost more lives as the meager intervention force was
stalled for a couple months while it waited for heavy machinery.

In the aftermath, Rwanda is a very different
country. While Hutus and Tutsis now live side by side, many feel that the only
way for them to survive is to destroy the other ethnic group. The post-genocide
government has tried to establish a greater level of stability within the
country to ensure that a second genocide will not happen.

The government has abolished the ethnic
identity cards that, for so long, were the only tangible means of distinguishing
one group from another. Many citizens of Rwanda still remember what their neighbours were once labeled, however, and many victims of the genocide live
side by side with the killers of their families. Many Rwandans now refuse
to place themselves in an ethnic category at all, however, and a new generation of Rwandans
who do not grow up with ethnic identity cards will help to ease the ethnic
tensions.

After the genocide was officially declared
“over” by the international community, the genocide continued outside of
Rwanda’s borders, in the refugee camps where the Hutu Power regime-in-exile had
set up operations. A year or two after the genocide, however, the government of
Rwanda, with help from the Ugandan government, launched an attack against these
camps and broke them up forcibly. This prevented the escaped criminals from
exercising further misery upon the refugees, and from launching attacks on
Rwanda. It also stopped the influx of foreign aid dollars funding reprisals
from the Hutu Power refugees.

Some things that can be done to prevent further
genocide in Rwanda would be monitoring of the radio broadcasts to ensure that no
hateful messages are sent, and to jam any frequencies that broadcast hateful
messages against one ethnic group or the other. Also, the infrastructure in
Rwanda has been completely gutted, and its restructuring will take a long time.
The Rwandans finally won the right from the UN to try their own criminals, in
their own country, though this process has been shown to have innumerable
problems of its own. Education is practically at a stand-still, and much needs
to be done to ensure that the children of Rwanda are taught to live in community
with each other. And, while recognize that it is a very Western way of looking
at things, there is a severe level of psychological damage that has been done to
the Rwandans almost categorically, and if those issues are not addressed then
there are sure to be repercussions in the future.